To Children Ardent For Some Desperate Glory
by Agravaine
Summary: A small band of increasingly erratic survivors fight a losing battle against Voldemort's regime. Minor to major AU elements from fifth year on. H/L, N/Hr.
1. 1

**The death of William Wallace**

There was the librarian Pince, and the auror Garrett, and the werewolf Katie Bell.

There was the turncoat Theodore Nott, who had slain his own father, and with him there was the house elf Gander. There was the warlock Adam Hyerall, and there was Penelope Clearwater with one arm and half a leg, and there was the spy Rita Skeeter.

There was mad Arthur Weasley, who had buried his children one by one, the mad Muggle-lover who'd long ago discarded his wand for an enchanted rusting Tommy Gun. There was no-nosed Neville Longbottom, with the serpent-and-skull etched in scarry green across his face. With him there was the beautiful Hermione Granger, his wife and lover, upon whose shoulder he now slumped.

There was the American Jasper Mull, millionaire-turned-mercenary, and the near-squib Samuel Delaney, who had made a living as a Muggle street magician. There was scarlet-clad Susan Bones, who in every engagement had never once taken cover but had walked away from each without a scratch.

And then there was Luna Lovegood, to whom he had pledged his heart and magic and soul.

Ensconced in the gloom of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, these were all those that Harry Potter had left.

A day before there had been the twins Patil, but they were dead, and with them Dean Thomas who'd fought with two wands at once, and Nymphadora Tonks so full of life. There had been the Scotsman MacColl and the Slytherin Marcus Flint and loyal Hannah Abbot who had been blown to pieces, before the boy-who-still-lived had led them to their deaths.

So many dead had marched from the war that they had abandoned any real ceremony long ago. In the parlor – these days permanently black – their eulogist Irma Pince recited a brief piece about each of their fallen comrades. How they'd lived, how they'd died.

Harry stood there among them without expression. "I have no tears left to cry, Hermione," he had told his friend that morning. She'd frowned for a second, as if to scold him for using a cliché she no doubt found loathsome, but instead she clutched him to her in a crushing hug.

"I am sorry for all this, Harry," she had said. "I really am."

"I'm…" He trailed off. "I'm sorry about Neville. I know he hasn't been the same since Bellatrix…."

She'd cut him off with a shake of her head and pulled him even tighter. "We're with you to the death, Harry. Both of us."

_To the death. _

"Thank you," he'd replied stiffly, and shrugged her off of him.

"Thank you," he said again, to all those assembled, after Pince finished her recitations. "You all fought well."

Harry had never been one for speeches.

That night he held Luna Lovegood close to him. He felt himself fill with want for her, want anchored not in lust but in desire for union and for wholeness. She alone among them was without anger, was without malice. Arthur had been that way once, the gentlest man he knew, before Ginny. But Luna remained constant, as her friends and father fell around her, as the world of wizarding Britain crumbled to wrack, as she fought and killed and maimed beside him.

"You're a good man, Harry Potter," she said, snuggling closer. And in the dark, Harry smiled.

The crowd at breakfast was no crowd at all. Skeeter had returned to her game, Weasely hardly left his room anymore, Granger and Pince and Longbottom had locked themselves away in the library. Theodore Nott, the most marked man in England after Potter, sat with dour-faced Weed Garrett as they picked at a stack of toast. In the beginning there were so many of them there that there'd been grumbling about the close quarters but it wasn't like that now.

Sam Delaney intercepted him before he could sit. He had a kind face, though not a handsome one. It was broad but with an angular jaw, and pockmarks checkered it about. "We don't blame you, Harry," the tall man said. "You couldn't have known."

"Thank you, Sam," Harry replied, and he meant it, though it seemed to him that it was all he still knew how to say.

Harry had once been wary of the man, for he had sat out the First Wizarding War. "There was no one to follow then," he'd said, by way of explanation. "There was no hope then, no… hero."

But Luna was the only one who still dealt in hope, though at times he saw Hermione try for Neville. There had been plenty in the first days. Doddering Jamey MacColl would call him Sir William after the hero of Falkirk. Hermione had brooded about Wallace's fate from the first but the others had cheered the ancient man. To Harry it seemed odd talk from a man whose entire family had died on the Somme, but Jamey bore that Tommy gallant spirit. And Jamey was dead and now they all brooded.

Harry wasn't so sure there was a hero now, either. A hero didn't kill, he gave life, and he had the blood of so many on his wand. He wished Dumbledore were still there to guide him, or Professor McGonnagal. _"It's just Minerva, now, Harry," she'd said the night Hogwarts fell._ But Draco Malfoy had slain Dumbledore that night on the Astronomy Tower, and Thorfinn Rowle had done for Minerva at Leeds.

Gunfire tore through his reflections. More rounds in the walls.

Sam frowned. "Poor Arthur. It's been hard on him."

The two men had been friends before the war, Harry knew.

"I should examine his ears for a wrackspurt infestation," said Luna with gravity as she came up behind. "They couldn't be doing him much good."

She winked and the two men grinned.

"Not until he shoots Mrs. Black," said Harry, pointing to the portrait of the dozing hag, and they laughed.

Arthur, truly, needed care. But they couldn't take him to St. Mungo's; it would be simpler to hand him directly to Voldemort for all the hospital would protect him.

So instead they joked about it, and was that so wrong?

**Family**

Harry James Potter was about to kill the only Death Eater he might have once trusted with his life.

It could have been simpler. Skeeter had said his target would be breaking his fast at the Floppy Flounder, a dubious Muggle pub on the outskirts of Edinburgh. For all the scorn his kind had for the non-magical world, the man had apparently taken a liking to the establishment's greasy morning fare.

Anyone else, and he'd have had four men in place to dispose of him quickly.

Instead, he had staked out the place himself, invisible beneath his cloak, waiting for his mark to arrive.

"Just kill the slimy cunt, Potter," Jasper Mull had rumbled at council. "Back of the head, nice and quiet. If you're going to be so fucking formal about it I'll do him myself. When I was in the Congo…."

"I owe the man an honorable death," he'd insisted, but Jasper saw things differently. A Death Eater was a Death Eater. "_If it's stinks like Crookshanks and if it's as goddamn ugly as Crookshanks, then what the fuck could it be but Crookshanks?" _

"I wonder what this slimy fellow would do if hewere Harry," Luna had replied absently. "Oh dear, that would be confusing now, wouldn't it? We'd have two Harries then." She whistled a few innocuous notes, and Jasper had just grunted and like a storm stormed away.

Harry had learned a long time ago how well Luna could manipulate those with whom she disagreed.

"I don't want to kill him," he'd told Hermione before he'd apparated away. "He's the only of them that's any good."

"I know, Harry. " She'd looked wretched, like she hadn't slept in weeks. Not that she'd be able to tell, though, since Neville had blown apart every mirror in the house. "But Jasper…."

_But Jasper._

This was it, then. The door jangled closed.

Harry removed his cloak, and put his wand at the Death Eater's throat.

"Harry," he said. Calm, like a hurricane's velvet eye.

"I challenge you to a duel. No seconds. To the death."

He nodded his acquiescence, and Harry lowered his wand.

They chatted amicably as they paced out the boundaries for the duel on the green across the way. Children were playing there, chattering and running, all glee, playing cops-and-robbers and Orange-and-Lemons and World War II, bold and happy and unafraid. Glasgow and Manchester hadn't happened here, not yet.

"How is Luna, then?" the Death Eater asked. Sparks were sent up, and the children scattered screaming. He gestured with his hand. "The Muggles learn quickly."

"She's good as ever," said Harry, and Lee grinned somewhat kindly.

"I'm truly sorry about this, you know," Lee said as they moved to take their positions. "I always thought you were a good wee little egg." It was true. Friends for so long at Hogwarts, and before its fall, he had sought out Harry and apologized for standing against him in the coming battle.

"It's not too late to join us, Lee. There's Nott…."

The Death Eater shook his head. "My father has chosen our loyalties. And I will be loyal to him." He lowered his voice. "He's a good man, you know. He took me in. He fed me and he clothed me."

Harry wondered briefly what it was like to have a parent to love and follow. "On three, then?"

"On three."

"One_." _Harry gripped his wand tighter. He'd never had love, the Dursleys had seen to that. When Augusta had butchered them like the swine they were, a tearful Hermione had remarked that she would have given anything for Harry to have had a real childhood. Luna had looked aghast at this. "We'd have a different Harry," she'd said. "And I like this one the way it is."

Ten paces from death_. You win, Jasper. _

"Two." He whipped his wand down. "_Avada Kedavra_."

The green light took him in the throat. It didn't kill him immediately; there wasn't enough hatred in it. Lee staggered back a few steps, surprised. "Good luck, Harry," he said, and then he crumpled back and died.

Green was the grass, but white was his face and red was the blood that guzzled from his mouth. _Harry James Potter, murderer._ But there was no point in taking chances on honor. He was not the Leader of the Light like they said, not when he was just clawing his way from the dark, not when he had no light left but Luna and even the moon is sometimes dim.

**An interlude for lovers**

"I killed him."

She paused as if this were an odd statement, and creased her brow. "I know," she said, her radish earrings dangling. "You wouldn't be here if you hadn't."

"On two. I killed him on two."

"Oh? Lots of things happen in twos. Like love," she said, and she kissed him and drew him close. A squeeze. Another kiss. A whisper: "We do what we must to survive. You're still a good man, Harry Potter."

He cried into her shoulder, long and free.

"Thy face coins then, and thy stamp they bear," she said, as if to herself. A Squib poet writing to his Muggle lover. A metaphysical. "And by this mintage they are something worth."

**A change of plans**

The reprisal came bursting like the hammers beneath the Thames. Ten thousand Muggle dead in Edinburgh and half the city burned, the work of the corpse-maker Augusta Nott. They were a different sort, Nott and Lee.

Sam had heard it over the radio, and Harry broke the news at dinner that night. Arthur Weasely was inconsolable. "Their cars," he sobbed red-eyed. "Their radios. Their _microwaves._"

"And the people themselves," Sam said, not unkindly. "Come, friend."

But Arthur had broken down completely, like he'd found Ginny all over again. When war came, sons were for sacrificing. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for one's Harry. _The father had seemed to accept this when Ron fell, and then one-by-one the others. _"Die, Weasel," Crabbe was shouting. Blood everywhere. Molly screaming. Crabbe blubbering for mummy as Harry twisted Godric Gryffindor's sword into his gut. _But his only daughter? It had ruined him.

They had dated briefly, before the war, but then she'd confessed that she didn't fancy boys _that way _and that had been that. Their relations had been strained at first, because Harry loved her like a maddened youth, but in that last glorious summer before the horcruxes they'd come together again.

_"Friends?"_

_ "Family," she said, and she kissed him light on either cheek._

And they'd fallen into an easy camaraderie, much easier than they'd ever had before.

Voldemort destroyed her like he did Britain. She'd been designated an especial target, Rita said, for in Tom Riddle's world there was as little room for sexual deviants as there was for blood traitors or friends of Harry Potter. So the dementors had sucked her dry, her and her lover Gabby 'lacour, and the Lord had kept her soulless shell as a plaything for his men.

Harry clenched up. _Whose doing but mine_? He wanted to rise and comfort Arthur, but the older man was already fleeing up the stairs. _Like a child throwing a tantrum._

"His rifle?" Neville asked.

Sam fiddled with his fork, staring down at his potatoes. "Locked away. Had to wrestle it away from him. Told him we didn't want any more accidents."

The day before, a round of cursed bullets had punctured through the reinforcing charms placed on Arthur's bedroom walls. One had grazed Neville's thigh: Gander had stitched it up, but Neville had gained one more scar.

An uncomfortable pause. _I dine with the mad and the broken. _

"It's clear that Voldemort is sending us a message," Garrett said, his words slashing silence. "We strike at him, and innocents will die."

"Like Edom O'Gordon," said Luna, and in that second Harry felt his love swell, for from all the puzzled looks it seemed to Harry that the reference had gone over even Hermione's head. _Who else could boggle the witch Albus Dumbledore had called the brightest of their generation?_

"We will choose our targets more selectively from now on," Harry said. _Time to lead and stumble._

"Not before I add matricide to my list of crimes," Theodore Nott cut in quietly. "What's one more parent, hmm?"

Another pitiful attempt at humor, but they were smiling and laughing all and Susan Bones practically cackling. ("She's almost as mad as Mr. Weasley, Harry," Hermione's voice came unbidden to him. _Neville is too, if you would only see._) Jasper Mull looked like he was about to bust his tattooed gut as he slapped Theodore across the back.

"Good man, Nott, good man," he said guffawing.

If Luna held any man in contempt, though Harry didn't think her capable, it would be this one. He was crude and coarse and merciless. _But he's the best wand we have, and he can tell an Imperius by a man's eyes. A savage heart, but a good one. _

He hated him most days, but he thought he loved him now because he'd made him kill and in the act of killing there lay such desperate beautiful joy. A muse, a muse, on red bloody waves.

"We will give Augusta a lot of work," Harry said when the man had finished his convulsion. It would have been a callous thing to say if he had not just murdered. Luna, though, her eyes flickered sadly. "But not yet."

"Meaning?" growled Katie Bell, grim since Greyback turned her.

"Tomorrow." Breath. "We destroy the last Horcrux."

Murmurs. When the hunt had gone cold, and when Hogwarts had fallen, and when everyone had turned to him, Harry had so willingly abandoned the Horcruxes to oppose the Lord's resurgence. Book and ring and locket, he'd got_. _Skull and grave and wand, too. No diadem nor chalice; for all Voldemort's ambitions they were forever lost_._ Now just statue and scar and the Lord could die and never rise again.

It had been the wrong decision. He'd known it from the beginning_. Am I so afraid to die? _He saw all the living faces there and all the specters of the dead, all those his own hand had as good as maimed and killed because he had so much fear.

"Do we have new info, then?" Mull demanded. "Because you've told us there was none to find. Pince, you find something in that reading of yours at last?"

_ I lied, you stupid bastard._

"It would seem that knowledge of horcruxes was suppressed by the Ministry in the late eighteenth century," Irma Pince said, stiffening at the informal address. "Minister Lord Owlet Childers. Wizards obliviated, texts that so much as referred to their existence burned." She'd sniffed primly. "Frankly I can understand why." An expectant pause. "But it does make information scarce." A huff, as if exasperated that she had to fill in the blanks for such simpletons.

Harry had grown to trust the stuffy woman who had so often thwarted his school-time exploits, but he remained in fear of her. Before passing out after one too many drinks one night, he'd told her about the times he and Ron and Hermione had snuck into the library after-hours.

"A month's detention with Mr. Filch, Potter," she'd replied coolly.

Harry had been afraid to look her in the eyes the next morning when he remembered. Argus Filch had been dead a year then – buried beneath the ruins of Hogwarts with all the rest – but Harry thought that with her piercing glare she might find a way to bring him back. _Reanimated custodian eats brains of Boy-Who-Lived_, the headlines in the _Daily Prophet _would read if there had been astaff left to publish it.

But she didn't intimidate Jasper Mull, and his profane protests echoed off the walls of Number 12 Grimmauld Place. They'd known this all already.

The librarian snorted as she hefted a battered blue book from her robes. Its center was burned through, where Harry had plunged a serpent's tooth. "You'll note, Jasper, that I never said we were without leads."


	2. 2

**In which things go wrong**

"No plan of operations," said Hermione Granger, wiping flecks of Sam Delaney's blood and brain from her forehead, "extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength. Helmuth von Moltke." She pressed herself closer to the rock as a flash of green light shot overhead. "The Elder."

"A Muggle?" asked Harry.

Hermione pursed her lips. "Really Harry." She shook her head. "Did you ever listen to a word Professor Binns was saying?"

"Not the time for history lessons," growled the demon-in-blood beside them. Neville. "We're pinned down."

Rita's reports had been wrong and they'd stumbled into an ambuscade.

Somewhere to his left, Harry heard Arthur Weasely's machine gun open up, its bullets infused with the Cruciatus Curse. _Rat-a-tat-tat--scree-thud-thud-eeeeeyaaaah. _Was anyone covering him? Luna, where was Luna? Susan Bones was far on his right, standing tall, the ground about her scorched apart by spells, her scarlet robes torn and flapping, flinging fear and fire from her wand. Katie, unseen, crying out.

He swigged the last dose of _Felix Felicis _from the vial about his neck_. _Slughorn's private store that Charlie and Garrett had raided. It was all but gone now, though Luna had been laboring over a batch for weeks. It was a difficult potion to make, she had reasoned, but not if she took it as she brewed it.

The giddiness took him. "_Protego!" _He sprang from his cover, curses flying all about him, and sprinted for the sound of Arthur's gun.

"We have to apparate the fuck out of here," Neville was screaming at him, but Harry was living luck. Green light severed a branch above his head and red blew holes in the ground beneath his feet. Rocks and pebbles shot everywhere but they never touched him. Katie, though, she was lying in the open ten yards away, not moving, half-wolf. _Mobilicorpus_? Too exposed. He sprinted the ten yards to her side but an _expulso _blew her apart as he got there.

He grabbed her by the legs to apparate her away, but her death wound had cut her in half and Harry had lost her chest and arms and head when he reappeared. Her guts were spilling from her but then there was Arthur Weasley coming out of the gloom like a ghost, bare chest streaked muddy brown, a red cloth about his head like a character from some Muggle movie, spraying bullets everywhere.

He left Arthur shooting madly from behind some oak and darted off for Luna. He hadn't wanted to bring the man, he was a liability, but if it weren't for luck he'd envy his madness now for he was afraid to die. There was Weed dueling two Death Eaters, now one, now both were down. One was Rowle, cursing as he bled out. He couldn't see the face behind the mask of hate and silver but he knew the voice. His senses screaming _this way, this way_. Another Death Eater loomed out of the mist in front of him. "_Sectumsempra!" _he cried and her blood jetted out in fountains and she fell away screaming. _This way, this way. _Over rock, over root, through twisting crevice. Arthur's gun shrieking. Jasper bellowing.

_This way_, _this way,_ but it was Merlin not Luna. He towered up fifteen feet, stone and moss and weathered years. A crash to rend the world apart, wards triggering, earth shattering, Inferi rising. A lash of fire, one and two and three ablaze, back against Merlin, four and five and six. Nott running up and being torn away, fighting with his hands. Fire, fire, more fire. Ten inferi, twenty inferi, a hundred inferi and he could no longer see Nott. Foul dead fingers on his face, grabbing him, "_Incendio"_ andthey were gone. Fire everywhere, wet woods blazing, Nott screaming. Then there was Susan blasting and blasting and screaming and blasting, she'd got up a tree and was killing them from there, but now the tree was burning and falling into the earth as the inferi clawed it down and she was jumping and Harry and Nott were back to back as the inferi came. Nott was casting fiendfyre and the fire-phoenix billowed and swallowed away the dead ten by ten by ten but he couldn't control it and it came for Susan roaring and she was burning and gone and Nott was screaming and Harry was running and someone was screaming and it was Harry. Merlin was creaking and rising from his ancient seat all in flaming green and he came like a conqueror and he met the phoenix and the heat seared Harry's face and he broke away but the heat could not melt the stone and the phoenix sputtered away and flashed and died. A boulder flew and smashed Merlin in the head and shattered and he felt a sharp pain in his side and he looked and a piece of stone had gashed him for not even Felix could protect him from that but Merlin hadn't even stumbled. Jasper had sent it, he was flinging curse after curse after curse but nothing stopped it as it came for Harry. Then Godric Gryffindor's blade met the statue in its leg and it clanged like tolling bells, and it stumbled to one knee and Harry was swinging the sword and he thrust it through the heart and it passed through the stone and the Dark Lord's soul shrieked as the inferi screeched and died again as Merlin blew to dust.

But then the Death Eaters were upon them as they climbed across the immolated earth. Nott dueled Nott among the fire and Jasper blew a hole in the chest of another. MacNair with his enchanted axe bore down on him and Harry matched the bastard blow for blow with the bastard blade of Gryffindor. Clang and clash and stroke and thrust and bloody lust and the executioner swung quick and heavy. MacNair drove him back and back, now taunting him and cursing him and he would have been dead if he hadn't been luck. "I fucked your loony whore, Potter. She came wet and willing and then I fucked her," and he spat and swung and missed, and as he overbalanced Felix spitted him on the end of Godric's blade. Harry wrenched it out and with it came bowels and shit and blood and screams. The big man staggered back and fell to earth as he lost his axe and the sword took him again in the throat and he died.

Then over there: "_Avada Kedavra, Avada Kedavra, Avada Kedavra._" Luna's voice. Through the smoke, through a stream, through the mud, and there was Luna, propped up against a rotten trunk and firing off killing curses and half her golden hair singed away and her leg a bloody mangled hunk of red.

"Get out of here!" he screamed and he turned to shoot up blue sparks. Blue, blue, blue, till he was sure everyone had seen them. He turned back and Luna was gone though she might have splinched and with a crack he slipped into the nothingness and back out with a pop and he stood there with Weed and Luna and Rita and Hermione and Neville supporting Nott and Jasper holding Hyerall. Skeeter sobbing apologies. "I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know." Sam was dead, Katie was dead, so was Susan, where was Arthur? Now he was there, hurling profanities at him for ordering the retreat. "You've robbed me of my vengeance!" and he had his gun to Harry's throat but then his eyes glazed as he stumbled and the back of his head fell away and bloodier than Mary he went down to join his sons.

"In, in! Wounded over here, over here," Pince yelled from the door gesturing to some new-white-made-beds in the parlor. Luna slumped onto one, Jasper dumped Hyerall on another and came back for Arthur, Nott just steadied himself and clutched his crooked arm and the giddiness and battle haze was wearing off and he blacked and then he was Harry not Felix again.

He shook his head to clear it. They were back in the long hall of Grimmauld, where Hermione and Neville were _scourgifying _bits of Sam Delaney from themselves. Someone had enervated the warlock, and he held his face in his hands and moaned. "He'll be okay," Weed whispered to him. "Got hit with a stunner in the first seconds and missed the whole thing." He barely listened as he sprang over next to Luna where Gander was muttering to himself and reclosing the wounds she'd sloppily self-healed.

"Hello, Harry Potter," she said weakly. Her eyes crossed weirdly, and her stare fixed on some far-off place. She ran her gentle bloody fingers across her breast. "That's odd," she murmured. "I seem to have misplaced my necklace somewhere. Daddy gave it me when I saw my first snorkack, you know."

_A necklace, bottle caps and string._ Its loss seemed greater to him than any of his friends, because it was so part of _her_. Sohe clutched her hand and kissed it and prayed to every god he knew while all the time he lied to her. "When this is all over," he said in a whisper, "we will go hunting for snorkacks together."

"I'd like that, Harry Potter," and she smiled and slept.

**The art of repartee**

"Harry," she said. "I'm pregnant."

He stared at the woman who had been with him for so many years, and he sucked in his breath. "I'm sorry, Hermione."

"Yes," she said.

_Just yes._ "Are you…?"

"No."

"I won't ask you to, Hermione. I can't."

She shook her head. "Jasper will. And Weed and Theo. It's a liability."

"There are so very few of us left," he said. A pitiful qualifier. "It all may end soon, if we can just find where he's hiding."

"Maybe," she said. "But what will be left? The world is ruined. Magic and Muggle."

_The world that will always be the one that's truly mine_, he thought she thought, though her mouth didn't make those motions.

"There's Australia," he said slowly, "or the States."

"It's my decision, Harry, not yours."

They were on the roof of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, among its grimy shingles and black-bricked chimneys. The lights of London blazing about them blotted out any wishing futile stars. So his arm he put around her, and her head she rested against him because he was all she had left.

"Does Neville know?"

She shook her head. "No. I can't… he can't…."

He was not the one she'd married. That had been Neville, the shy boy whose mind budded like the plants he loved. When the war was done and they'd raised Hogwarts from the rubble, he'd have liked nothing better than to be a Professor Sprout to generations of students. Neville the intellectual, that's why they'd fit so well together. They had whirling-whirlwind marry-vowed, spitting upon all her characteristic caution. _"Who knows how much time we'll have together if we can't end this war, Harry? I want every moment of it." _But the war had replaced Neville with some barbaric broken warrior, withdrawn from even his wife, and consumed by rage and tears.

"You know, Harry," she said. "They're wrong. The writers, I mean. The first time you squeeze the trigger, the first time you use an Unforgivable, that's when it happens. When you become an animal. It's not gradual. That's just what they tell themselves after, so they can pretend they didn't know."

"It can be a glorious thing to kill."

"Yes," she said. "To us it can."

"But it shouldn't."

"No."

"Do you remember your first?"

"No."

"I do," he said. "Crabbe. Every day."

"It's the kind of thing they say you're supposed to remember."

"Who says?"

"_They_. Books."

"Ah."

"So many."

"A war to end all wars?"

She snorted. "Do you really believe that?"

"Woodrow Wilson did."

"So he said."

She stared into the black squid night, and he watched her.

"I'm sorry, Hermione."

"His face, Harry. It pains him worse than Bellatrix's _Crucios_ ever did. Every day she lives, it eats him. To bear the Dark Mark like that. He feels like… like's he failed. Britain. His parents. Me. You."

"I'm sorry, Hermione."

"He hit me yesterday, you know. After the battle. He cried afterwards, and hexed himself until I made him stop."

"I'm sorry, Hermione."

"Don't you ever say anything else?" she snapped suddenly, wrenching away from him. "I can't leave him, not now, not here."

"I'm sorry, Hermione," he said automatically. Neville wasn't the only one becoming withdrawn.

Hermione didn't deign to respond.

**Respite**

Luna, he'd found, was a romantic. She'd read the ballads of Child and the prose of Scott and the verse of Tennyson and the ravings of Keats. She could quote them too, although she never did to anyone but Harry. ("Typical Ravenclaw," Ron had snorted when he'd found out.) And if he fought for her and not for England, she was England. She lived and breathed its essence. She carried on her brow the pastoral innocence of the years-gone lover. But she carried there old Xeno Lovegood had told him once, anyway, and he thought he understood some of what the man had meant. _She sees the world in ways no else can. _

_I love her._

But Luna could also be simple in her complexity. "My favorite books," she said, and he expected her to name something too the gnosis of England's ages, its mysteries and its secrets and its cults. That was what mad spectacularly literary, "are Choose Your Own Adventure Books. You can always make them end how you want."

"No you can't," said Harry, who had once read some of Dudley's, and he couldn't help but laugh at her outrageousness. "That's the whole point of them. The endings are surprises."

"No," said Luna. "Not if you're a good guesser." And she changed subjects then, like she was wont. "I should like to learn to morris. It would so please Father. He loves that kind of thing, you know. Would you learn with me?"

Draco Malfoy had shat upon Xeno Lovegood's bloody corpse and Harry wondered if Luna's mangled leg would ever let her dance again. Dean Thomas had quartered Malfoy two limbs at a time, but he tried not to think of any of that now. Not that he had to die, or of Ron or Hermione or Neville or Arthur or anyone. "Yes," he said instead, picturing Ron and Sirius splitting their sides as he pranced about in the morris-man's effeminate garb. "I would."

"I should like to dance again," she said, her voice a lilting nightingale. "In the good greenwood, where the mavis and merle are singing."

"Spenser?" he asked, taking a wild stab.

She smiled and shook her head. "Spenser wrote _The Faerie Queene_, Harry Potter, not that."

Harry snickered at the title, but Luna didn't seem to get why. "Really, the wrackspurts must truly be getting to you," she said with dubiously mock concern, her hands creeping downward.

"I hear that the more serious infestations occur elsewhere besides the brain." "I hear that too," said Luna gravely. "And it would explain why you're so being so circumlocutory." She giggled. "Unsheathe thy sword, Sir William, that I may gaze upon it."

They took each other tenderly, and they panted and writhed and when they were done they lay wrapped in each other's silent arms.

Luna always seemed content to lie there after, remote and free. But Harry's mind was always restless. Guilt. A familiar emotion. _Hello_.

"Luna," he said.

"Hmm?" She nuzzled into him.

"I don't want you with me. At the final battle." He knew it was futile before he said it, and insulting, but he couldn't not. If she had been Hermione, she would have launched into a long tirade about inequity in gender relations. If she had been Ginny, he'd have gotten a friendly sock in the arm for his troubles, or in the balls depending on her mood.

But Luna was Luna, and – "You're a silly goose, Harry Potter."

"Honk," he replied ruefully, playing with her hair.

**Espionage**

Harry, who had murdered, felt little guilt for spying on them. He'd summoned an Extendable Ear from some dusty corner of the mansion with a flick of his wand. One of the last in the whole world, most like. The twins were dead, their shop and stock burned for blood in bloody fog.

"Hermione, no, please." A desperate, desperate whine. "You promised you'd always love me, on our wedding day, when you kissed me and took me by the hand and said 'I do'."

The faint sound of smacking lips.

"Love is not constant from kiss to kiss, Neville."

_How poetic. _He'd quarreled with Luna, and his thoughts were foul. _So that's it for Longbottom and Granger._

He'd heard enough. Weed would have told him to worry about what it meant for matters of "internal cohesion" or some other auror bullshit jargon, but he didn't give a damn because he had to die and anyway he'd see soon enough the terms on which the spouses parted.

He had no reason to be anything but nonplussed. _I cry only for my enemies._

Rita caught him on the stairway a few minutes later. "Did you hear?" she said. A whisper of a conspiracy. "Neville and Granger are calling it quits."

Rita Skeeter, animagus. _So you were in there too, Rita._ She buzzed about, feeding on gossip like honey. She'd done more for the cause than he cared to admit, and if she hadn't been an _animagus _they'd all be rotting in the deep.

He'd never stopped finding her revolting.

"Thank you for telling me, Rita," _you worm_, he said, and brushed her by. "I hadn't heard."

"I always said it would end this way," she called after him. "Granger, the poor thing. He was always a brute, I said. And she's probably hysterical now, the dear, but really she should have known better."

_She relishes this. _War makes strange allies, Dumbledore had said_. And beasts out of men._

Hermione caught up to him that night, all cold and stern and grim.

"I loved him."

"I'm sorry, Hermione." This time he said it with an irony of intent.

"Thank you," she said with utter sincerity, and they sat together and mourned.

When Hermione came down for breakfast the next morning, she ate her eggs and chatted cordially and then as if an afterthought noted that Neville had hanged himself sometime in the night.

"Stupid boy," said Weed.

On parchment a final adieu. "A visage so beautiful cannot be born when all other beauty is lost."

"O, poor, tormented soul!" said the marionette as they cut him down. The wiping away of insidious tears behind horned rims as though they were its tears to cry. "Scorned by the woman he loved, his spirit crushed by the tempest of war! O, was there ever such woe?"

Rita Skeeter, she ever danced a different dance, dancing from strings like Neville danced from rope, and the wrong one Harry thought lay cold and dead.


	3. The End

**Requiem**

The sun sets in the valley and I am watching.

Standing there is the librarian, haughty Pince, and Garrett the last auror in all England, and that bastard Jasper Mull. She is plotting the novel she never wrote, and he is thinking of his glittering Nymphadora, and he just wants blood and a fag and a blowjob before he dies because he is a simple man.

There is the turncoat Theodore Nott, who has his own father slain, and with him there is his house elf Gander. He wants only to kill his mother, and the other wants only to lay down his life for him, and they will all three die together. There is the warlock Adam Hyerall with his staff of oak and ash and thorn, and there is one-armed half-legged Penelope Clearwater balanced on a broomstick, and there is the vermin Rita Skeeter. He is wishing that he had combed his beard because it is tangled and he knows that this is perverse, and she-the-cripple is making peace with the cross-butchered man she calls her savior, and she-the-beetle wants to fly far away. There is beautiful Hermione Granger, her soul intact a soulless shell, and I don't think she is thinking anything at all, and she never will again because Bellatrix will cut her down at the very first.

There too is Luna Lovegood, who will still fight on foot though she can barely stand, the one to whom he has pledged his heart and magic and soul. She fights for the good greenwood where with him she can dance and lie and sing and love and she fights because she must though it destroys her though he will never know it because she hides it so well. And he fights for England and she is England and so he fights for her.

For there among them all is Harry James Potter who is thanking them because that is all he knows how, and he is a cold-blood vicious killer and a hot-blood gentle lover, and like Sir William so brave and true and like Lord Edom so cowardly and cruel, and he is a light in the darkness and a darkness in the light, and he is the last hope of all the world.


End file.
